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You can't out-perform your self-image.

William James

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Self
Perform
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More quotes by William James

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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
William James
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Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
William James
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In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
William James
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
William James
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Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.
William James
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
William James
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
William James
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Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
William James
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
William James
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The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.
William James
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
William James
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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
William James
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We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
William James
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Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.
William James
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
William James
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If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.
William James
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
William James